(Phil Ochs in the 1960s)
OXFORD, Miss. – Way back in 1964, the year of “Freedom
Summer” and the disappearance and death of three civil rights workers in
Neshoba County, the “singing journalist” Phil Ochs offered this elegy:
“Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of
Mississippi, find yourself another country to
be part of”
More recently an anonymous writer who calls himself the “Socialist Wizard” composed and published a new version of Ochs’ classic with President Trump taking Mississippi’s place. In the song, the singer asks that the president find “another country to be part of”—another sign perhaps of what writer Peter Applebome has called “the Americanization of Dixie.”
As 2018 draws to a close, and 2019 looms ahead, Mississippi,
as extreme as it has always seemed to many Americans, is indeed a microcosm of
the nation. In the 2018 election, Mike Espy, a black Mississippian with
impressive credentials as a former congressman and U.S. secretary of
agriculture, came closer than any Democrat since 1982 to winning, garnering 46
percent of the vote in a racially divided state.
Still, he lost to Trump devotee Cindy Hyde-Smith, who made
her president, gun rights and the evils of abortion and illegal immigration the
most important election issues to her white supporters in the nation’s poorest
state. No matter that Mississippi already has the nation’s most restrictive
laws on abortion, or that illegal immigration is at a 12-year low.
Espy, hardly a wild-eyed radical as a former supporter of
Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and card-carrying member of the
National Rifle Association, campaigned largely on the need to do something
about the state’s (and nation’s) deteriorating health care system.
Nationally, the Democrats took over the U.S. House of
Representatives in the elections, but they lost ground in the U.S. Senate,
where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already indicated he’s once
again going after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid along with the
complete dismantling of the Affordable Care Act. The pretext for a renewed
assault on Social Security and other popular safety net programs? The U.S.
budget deficit, of course! Never mind that McConnell and his fellow Republicans
deeply worsened that deficit with the gigantic 2017 tax cut they bestowed on
the nation’s richest (and most solidly Republican voting) citizens.
With Democrats in charge of the U.S. House, new momentum in
the longstanding investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. political affairs
can be expected. Looking beyond just the 2016 election and Trump’s White House,
let’s hope investigators will give close scrutiny to K Street lobbyists such as
former U.S. senator from Mississippi Trent Lott, who gave up his office to join
with his buddy and former Democratic U.S. senator from Louisiana, John Breaux,
to form a powerful lobbying team in 2008. Lott and Breaux were principal
lobbyists for Gazprombank, a subsidiary of Russia’s biggest natural gas
supplier, in 2014, according to journalist Craig Unger’s new book House of Trump, House of Putin.
Unger goes on to write that Haley Barbour’s lobby firm,
Barbour Griffith & Rogers, has been the beneficiary of $2 million in
payments from the Russian conglomerate Alfa. These are all part of a
wide-ranging network of Russia’s big money influence in Washington, D.C.
These days Trump is rattling his saber at General Motors for
the firm’s recent announcement that it was shutting down five plants, four of
them in the United States, and cutting 14,000 jobs, all in the wake of Trump’s
self-ballyhooed deal to replace NAFTA with a
new, worker-friendly trade deal.
Just days before GM’s announcement, Nissan chairman Carlos
Ghosn was arrested and soon to be fired in connection with allegations he had
dipped into company coffers for his own further enrichment and at the same time
underreported his earnings at the company.
Yes, this is the same Carlos Ghosn who bitterly fought workers’
efforts to organize at his plants in Mississippi and Tennessee and who was
welcomed in Mississippi as a corporate hero for bringing Nissan’s giant plant
to Canton.
Phil Ochs, what would you say to this turn of events?
Mississippi, no need to find another country to be part of. You’re very much
the heart of this one.
A version of this
column will appear as my last regular monthly column for the Jackson Free
Press, although I hope still to appear in
those pages from time to time. My Labor South blog continues, of course, and I hope to be able to devote more time
to it and make it stronger than ever. I’ve been writing a regular column for Mississippi
newspapers for 35 years, the last six at the Jackson Free Press, but book
writing, teaching and other duties have made it difficult to continue. The
column has been a great ride, but I’ll be still firing away in this blog and
elsewhere! Best wishes to all for a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year!
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